However, I don't think bungahighs will help get people down a mile of road that's under 1-2m of filthy water so they can get onto the dry road network and deliver their children to school, themselves to work and get some shopping in.

How much does it cost to build a 1 or 2m high embankment on flat land to run the road along? The Victorians managed to do hundreds of miles of embankments for railways with pick and shovel. Surely raising vulnerable roads a few feet wouldn't be expensive?

Managed retreat. Its the only way. You cannot keep spending money to keep nature at bay.

The rivers are silting up because they are returning to their natural state. Let them.

The answer is short and harsh. Dont live in an area that floods - and dont place reliance upon an authority carrying out mitigative work forever. This is the case with attenuation ponds, reliance of people to do 'stuff' during a flood etc that developers propose as mitigative options in order to get developments through planning - residential dwellings have a design life of 100 years - will the developer be there to manage the attenuation pond in 100 years time or will the flood action plan have been passed from householder to householder - no they won't

The householders must take some responsibility for choosing to live where they have rather than finger pointing and trying to blame someone else.

Teenrat, don't talk bollocks, the Dutch have been successfully managing living in a country that's largely below sea level.
The rivers around there vary, to the north the River Brue which roughly defines the top edge of the Levels, runs past Glastonbury and joins the sea at Highbridge hasn't flooded and isn't silted. Why? Because it's properly managed, and has a tidal gate to stop the sea from bringing silt in at high tide and clogging up the river.
This is why you see no issues in the northern Levels. All that's needed is for the Tone and Parrat to be managed like they have been since Roman times, by locals who know exactly what needs doing, and for a tidal gate at the mouth of the Parrat like the Brue has, keeping in mind that the Tone joins the Parrat at Burrowbridge, which is the limit of the tidal section of the river.
Given those two provisos, expensive works like building up roads wouldn't be necessary, because the flooding would be very much more controlled, like it has been for centuries.

The householders must take some responsibility for choosing to live where they have rather than finger pointing and trying to blame someone else.

Really, do you only read the Daily Mail or The Sun? You do realise these people have been living in the same places for generations! There are farms under water that have never flooded in 150 years! Don't you grasp what the significance of that is?
They have a legitimate cause to blame someone else; the EA, who scrapped all the local Water Boards twenty years ago, with a commitment to let the rivers flood for environmental reasons.
They talk about costs of dredging, yet spend £22million pounds on a nature reserve at Steart Point, how does that make sense?
Maybe you ought to visit the Nederlands, and lecture them about living somewhere that would flood without their spending millions of Euros to stop it.
Expect to be told politely to go screw yourself.
Clot.

I love all this managed landscape back to the romans tosh being spouted, makes it sound like there has been a masterplan for the levels for millennia. At best it might have been managed cohesively since the war, maybe a 40 year period. Before that individual areas were managed by individual land owners who basical dug ditches to get water off their land and onto someone else asap. One thing that has come out of this thread is most people agree the whole catchment basin needs managing in order to protect those couple of hundred homes and farms, the political structures and most of the technology didn't exist 100 years ago.

Bottom line is the media have now forgotten about, the government / EA will look at the commercial aspects and concluded big flood defence schemes aren't justifiable. In the meantime the one thing the government has done is to get a levy on home insurance to pay for the insurance of the uninsurable which defeats the basic concept of insuring against a risk and we pay anyway, no body wins.

Funny seeing this thread again. We're in West Berks and have been VERY close to flooding more than once this winter. Even last Saturday, where we had to call 999 and get the Fire Service out, who funnily enough have still not left from our callout on Sat. Although they are proposed to leave today (being replaced by the EA)

We were looking through the survey report which stated that our house had between a 0-2% chance of flooding within our lifetime. So, not all people who purchase houses and are later affected by floods are completely stupid and bought in a flood plain.

Interesting to note, the Fire crew and kit is costing ITRO £2000 per day to be outside our house currently.

How much does it cost to build a 1 or 2m high embankment on flat land to run the road along? The Victorians managed to do hundreds of miles of embankments for railways with pick and shovel. Surely raising vulnerable roads a few feet wouldn't be expensive?

That is one of the options included in the £100m costing but I don't think they've broken out the elevated road element. It would certainly improve access to villages during flood events but if other parts of the plan are going to stop the flooding it may not make economic sense to raise the roads as well.

Has anyone mentioned the fact that modern farming methods cause much higher rates of soil erosion that will silt up the rivers faster?

What, like the specific exemption of oilseed rape crops from having to include ground cover to abate runoff for example? Not sure.

You may be interested in a few facts about the rain this winter to help educate the debate. Parts of the South of England had between 85 and 95% of the annual average rainfall in 10 weeks. That is somewhere between 600 and 700mm.

With the records that are around that is more rain than has ever been seen in that time period. There are quite a few records going back more than 100 years so we can start to see this is an exceptional event.

If you use a figure of 0-2% chance of flooding that is not time limited. If you flood today/this year you still have a 0-2% chance of flooding tomorrow/next year.

The climate change scenarios from 5-10 years ago predicted warmer wetter winters and dry summers. This has happened this year and may be a signal that it is going to happen more often. However the cold/freezing winters previously are also in the scenarios if things like the gulf stream move, so we are still in a wait and see/keep measuring mode.

Hydrologist hat off and tries to find a patch of dry land to get the bike on to.

You make a good point mantn.
It is the same issue with the snow a couple of winters back. Yes we could spend millions on snow ploughs and grittters, but for a one in a few years / decade / century extreme event. Or we could suck up that winters can be harsh, and sometimes lives are affected, quite severely. I spent a month in the harsh winters a month ago having to travel an in ploughed, in gritted little road, and walk a mile up a mountainside to get to work (unless I could hitch a ride on the quad that was taking food up to the outdoor centre and farm). It was part and parcel of living where we did. It was frustrating. But I did not go asking the council for a shiny extra fritter and plough or compensation.

IMO lots of this has been a press frenzy with political scoring going on, and upset, hurt flood victims lashing out.
I still feel for the people involved in any flooding, it is terrible. They are victims of poor land management both in the vicinity of their home and dozens of miles away upstream. They are also victims of living on vulnerable land. The effects of flood are far greater than snow or wind.

But, we just can't financially afford to spend hundreds of millions on preventing them from being flooded again, because the locations some are in are so vulnerable.

Perhaps we should work with insurance companies, and instead of paying for repairs to some buildings, think big and consider moving some properties, building mounds or floating house etc like the Dutch have. Working with insurance companies now would save them and the taxpayer money in the long term.

With the records that are around that is more rain than has ever been seen in that time period. There are quite a few records going back more than 100 years so we can start to see this is an exceptional event.

Not convinced. January 2014 for example had fairly similar rainfall to the four wettest months pre 1960. So, yes a wet winter but nothing not seen before.

Count zero - I think there is a big difference between the Netherlands and the Somerset levels in that if the dutch dont carry on keeping the sea at bay and maintaining drainage , they lose their country - the economic and social consequences are huge.

In regards to the 'it has been managed for X many years' - let me provide a couple of examples :

1) A port Authority dredges a river for navigation purposes, not flood mitigation, but there are added benefits for flood mitigation. Are the Port Authority then obliged to continue dredging for decades to come even though they may not need to dredge for navigation anymore.

2) A community is downstream of a large hydropower reservoir, that is maintained at a half full level in order to maximise the hydropower output - this provides a huge amount of storage to capture flood hydrographs which results in a lower flood peak flow at the location of the community. Are the hydropower operators then obliged to always keep the reservoir at a half full level even though the primary purpose of the reservoir is hydropower not flood defence. What if the operators wish to walk away, the reservoir would maintain a full level and offer no flood storage.

Countzero, my point is, it is easy to become so reliant upon management to keep flooding at bay, but it is always prudent to keep in mind that management may change or stop, especially if the primary purpose is not flood defence.

The climate is also not what it has been like for the last 150 years - it is time to not focus on the point of 'we haven't flooded for X many years' but focus on the point of ' we have flooded - is this likely to be a more common event due to climate shift'

I'm way too close to all this to comment but here's a quite frankly jaw dropping extract from a statement I put together this week:

At 5am on Tuesday 24 December the Leigh Barrier Flood Storage Area (FSA) was empty and the River Medway was flowing unrestricted in its normal channel. The FSA is legally permitted to store a maximum of 5.5 million cubic metres of water. By 8pm on 24 December, at the peak of this flood, the FSA was storing water at 10mm below its safe limit.

So, in one day on one part of one river last year, a storage structure was holding back 5.5 million tonnes of water, at this time they were also restricting the outflow to 160 tonnes a second.

I'm sypmathetic to the pepole who've been flooded, but I think some people need a sense of perspective. There was a woman on the news in floods of tears because of the 'devastation' to her life. In reality her wood floors were knackered.

Compare that to people whose whole towns were washed away in the tsunami, or demolished in an earthquake with nowhere to go; or the guy whose brother was swallowed up slowly by a sinkhole as he watched, never to be seen again.

I always think of the family in Olkahoma or wherever it was being interviewed after their house was reduced to splinters by a tornado. The guy smiled and said 'we're all fine and that's the important thing'.

Just because someone else has a greater problem in the world, doesn't mean someone elses problems become irrelvent.

Using your logic, we'd never eat any food as we'd donate it all to Oxfam for the starving masses, we wouldn't sleep in our own beds, would give our rooms to homeless people instead.

No-one is saying the plight of flood victims is the end of the world for them, however, it's your HOME, this is the pride and joy you've spent time, money, effort and built memories in. It also financially affects the person from an insurance perspective, resale value/potential etc. Whilst i agree with the "we're all fine" logic, having used it recently due to flooding issues, that doesn't change the fact it's had an adverse effect on my life recently.

I'm sypmathetic to the pepole who've been flooded, but I think some people need a sense of perspective. There was a woman on the news in floods of tears because of the 'devastation' to her life. In reality her wood floors were knackered.

But the shame, THE SHAME, how will she now keep up with the Joneses without those environmentally friendly reclaimed oak floorboards?

I'm a little more sympathetic to e.g. farmers who have lost vast sums of income and possibly their who livelihood owing to damage to land/crops/livestock.

People who've lost a few knick knacks and a carpet, less so.

edit: ^ yes, I understand it's a complete hassle, a royal pain in the backside and very disruptive - but knick knacks get replaced by insurance.

It's my home that was sold before this, it's now not sold and TBH i'm not sure it can be sold. We were selling it as we wanted a new home, for our son to grow up in, a home with a garden he can play in and friends he can invite over to play.

Minor inconveninece though yeah... that's all it is... just a small irritation. Lying awake night after night when it's raining, taking day after day off work to man the pump, spending hours and hours through the night in the cold making sure the pump has diesel while watching the level of water get closer to your home, to your family who you're there to protect...

Well your family aren't going to die because of 2ft of water, for a start. And yes, it is difficult, but it's really not the end of the world. You've still got a house, a job, and your family aren't dead, so count your blessings.